Monthly Archives: February 2012

As a result of watching movies like Indiana Jones, Osler Go knew he wanted to pursue a career in film from age 12. But growing up in Oʻahu’s Kalihi neighborhood with parents who emigrated from the Philippines, Go did not know if it would be possible.

“My mom was a maid and my dad always had two full-time jobs, sometimes three,” he recalls. “For practical purposes, we needed to get real jobs to help the family. It’s not like I could go around filming when my dad was putting in 80-hour work weeks.”

His family’s move to Hawaiʻi Kai was a pivotal event. “My parents wanted to provide for us better,” Go says. “Being shown the opportunities of what was available was a big deal.” He graduated from Kaiser High School and enrolled at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, pursuing a major in anthropology and a minor in history. The first member of his family to attend college, Go worked full-time to pay for tuition.

After graduating in 2006 and working as a computer analyst, he decided to get serious about a career in film. His background in anthropology provided a basis for writing scripts. “I majored in anthropology because I love culture and cultural activity,” he says. “I still retain a lot of concepts from my anthropology classes when I write scripts today.”

Mutual friends introduced Go to Johnathan Walk, a student in UH’s Academy for Creative Media. Like Go, Walk had wanted to pursue a career in film from an earlier age.

“ACM puts you into contact with other like-minded individuals. We realized we had a similar tone and style, certain qualities that we respect and admire about films. We got along well so we started working together,” recalls Walk, who is majoring in film and TV production and plans to graduate this Spring.

In 2007, Go, Walk and a few other partners entered the UH Mānoa Business Plan Competition sponsored by the Shidler College of Business.

Winning in the Best Business Plan, Undergraduate Category convinced them that they could form their own company, and 1001 Stories was born two years later. Go is the writer/director/producer; Walk is director of photography and primary editor.

“There’s the idea that there can be many stories behind anything and everything,” Go says of their business name. “We love the idea that there’s so many available perspectives and viewpoints. The ‘1000’ is a reference to the possibilities and opportunities; the ‘1’ is the singularity, the uniqueness of all those possibilities.”

“Culturally, the number ‘1000’ is an infinite,” Walk adds. “It’s that infinite portion that attracted us. Also, the idea of ‘1’—the power of the masses and the power of the individual.”

An individual’s experiences contribute to the heart of a film’s story, according to Go. He often pulls lessons from his own childhood when writing scripts. “One of the problems of aspiring filmmakers is they pull from movies rather than real life. The heart of a story should come from something that you bring yourself.”

Walk, whose mother is a Vietnamese immigrant, agrees that their upbringing contributes to their work. “The common thing about first generations is that our parents provided us with work ethic and discipline,” he says.

“Our parents had to work doubly hard; we saw that,” says Go. “We can’t help but pick up on their ‘don’t take things for granted’ viewpoint. We’re aspiring filmmakers who will do whatever it takes to do our stories.”

The duo has also created TV commercials for clients such as Hawaiian Telcom and tribute documentaries, including one filmed for Japan’s Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation.

Five student recruitment commercials they made for UH Mānoa won the American Advertising Federation Hawaiʻi 2011 Pele Award for Best Television Campaign.

The partners also participate in charitable efforts, from the Hawaiʻi Children’s Cancer Foundation to Films by Youth Inside, a two-week program conducted at the Hawaiʻi Youth Correctional Facility in Kailua. After a crash-course in film, the youths create a short film with the 1001 guys’ help.

But Go and Walk focus on more than the film techniques. “More important than showing them about film is providing that opportunity or letting them recognize that there is an opportunity,” Go says. “Empowering them this way, letting them film their own films, shows them they can do things other than what they were previously doing. That’s the biggest lesson they take away from this.”

Health studies make headlines nearly every day—and rightly so, since most of us want to read about ways to enjoy healthier lives. But what happens when the newest studies seem to yield conflicting findings?

Dr. John Chen

“You really have a medical impact if you publish a study, and you certainly do not want to mislead the public,” said Dr. John Chen of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM). “Unfortunately, an alarming number of biomedical studies, even published studies, do not seem to have a sound study design or have handled their data inappropriately.”

Dr. Chen and his team of statistical professionals, the new Biostatistics & Data Management Core at JABSOM, are available to collaborate with investigators on grants and to provide research design and statistical analysis support to basic science, clinical and translational researchers. Their research design and data analysis skills can be an enormous help to researchers.

Chen added that they can help researchers from very early on, at the conception of a study. “As statisticians, we have been trained to think about randomization, bias, blinding, confounding, concepts which are critical to an investigation that biomedical researchers may or may not have thought about. Certainly as professional biostatisticians, data analysis is also our bread-and-butter. To have us handle your data management and analysis is like having CPAs doing your tax returns. It might cost you a little bit, but will be worry free,” said Chen.

Even better, professional biostatistics and data management support can help increase the odds that a biomedical researcher gets the opportunity in the first place to embark on a research investigation.

“A researcher’s chance of receiving funding is improved dramatically when sound statistical reasoning and design, and proper data analysis plan are employed to support the investigator,” Chen explained. The availability and strength of biostatistics and research design expertise has been shown to result in substantive increases in the research funding and the quality of biological and health sciences research at academic centers across the country. Chen points to institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, with more than 140 biostatisticians, and even smaller universities like Wake Forest, which has over 60. Chen’s new team at JABSOM currently includes three other Ph.D. consultants, Hyeong Jun Ahn, James Davis, and Guangxiang (George) Zhang.

Since the reopening of the core, various types of service requests have been coming in. “We’re like a good plumber,” said Chen with a smile. “People come to us with different problems all along the research chain, from study design to interpreting findings, and we try our best to help them all go through smoothly.”

The Biostatistics & Data Management Core is trying to reach out to as many people as it can, in and out of academia. “With strong collaborations and support from biostatistics groups at the University of Hawai’i Cancer Center, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and Hawai’i State Department of Health, we want to build a ‘Hawai’i Biostat ‘Ohana’ to encourage more communication and collaboration among biostatistical professionals working in our islands,” said Chen. “We want to help produce the next generation of strong, independent investigators, research leaders and mentors in Hawai’i.”

The Biostatistics & Data Management Core is located on the top floor of the Medical Education Building in Kaka`ako. It’s worth the elevator ride to get there.

If you can’t be an astronaut, why not eat like one? The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and Cornell University are on a joint mission: Find eight people with qualifications similar to those required by NASA astronaut applicants to take part in a NASA-funded Mars analog habitat study, Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS.

According to the HI-SEAS website, lengthy space exploration missions have required specialized foods to sustain an isolated crew over long periods of time in places with limited or no access to food in the local environment. Enter prepackaged rehydratable or ready-to-consume foods for meals. Nevertheless, astronauts eating a restricted diet over a period of months ultimately experience “menu fatigue,” also known as food monotony. This notion of “menu fatigue” puts astronauts at risk for nutritional deficiency, loss of bone and muscle mass, and reduced physical capabilities. Compounded with the notion of “menu fatigue,” only a few of the many available astronaut foods have the three- to five-year shelf life required of foods for a Mars mission.

Kim Binsted

“I got involved in this study because I served as a crew member in another long-term analog study, in the Canadian High Arctic,” said UH Mānoa Information and Computer Sciences Associate Professor Kim Binsted. “So I was highly motivated to figure out how to make tasty food out of shelf-stable ingredients.”

The HI-SEAS food study is designed to simulate the living and working experience of astronauts on a real planetary mission and to compare two types of food systems – crew cooked vs. pre-prepared – in the context of a four-month Mars analog mission. Specifically, participants in this group will explore the impact of food preparation, food monotony, nasal congestion and smelling acuity on food and nutrient intake in isolated, confined microsocieties.

In addition, the study explains that crewmembers will wear “spacesuits” whenever they need to venture outside and consume a diet including both freeze-dried and dehydrated foods similar to present-day astronaut foods, plus foods that they prepare themselves from shelf-stable supplies—an alternative approach to feeding crews of long-term planetary outposts. The study will also track the use of habitat resources related to cooking and eating to provide data for future designs of planetary habitats.

Once the eight finalists are selected, they will embark on a five-day training workshop in early summer 2012 on the Cornell University campus in New York to train in research procedures and use of the research equipment, learn how to plan menus and prepare appealing meals from shelf-stable ingredients, and work together to plan their activities for the habitat experiences. The group will then be divided, with six forming the habitat crew and two serving as research support specialists/alternates.

A two-week-long training mission to test research procedures and experience living in a Mars-like environment is planned for the fall of 2012. The last phase of the study, a four-month analog experience, is planned for early 2013.

A newly published novel by the late best-selling writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton titled Micro was inspired in large part by his visit to the lush forests of UH Mānoa’s Harold L. Lyon Arboretum.

The author-screenwriter of Jurassic Park and other blockbusters visited the Arboretum in May 2008 with his wife, Sherri, to get acquainted with the vast and varied landscape of the nation’s only university botanical garden located in a tropical rainforest. He died later that year while still working on Micro.

“Some of the Arboretum’s history and gardens, including the bromeliad garden, are depicted very well,” said Christopher Dunn, director of the Lyon Arboretum. “Several chapters focus on action and suspense in the arboretum. Great stuff! I’m delighted with it!”

This isn’t the first time that Lyon Arboretum’s tropical setting has inspired creative minds. It was also filmed in the movies Jurassic Park III and Tears of the Sun – and it’s been a setting for television’s Hawaii Five-0.

According to former staff Alice Katajima, Crichton was a quiet man, but asked a multitude of questions, particularly of the bromeliad garden and talipot palm. Katajima gave the first-time visitors, the Crichtons, something to take home with them as a memento: a bag of jaboticaba (Brazilian grapes). “They also picked some skeletonized leaves from underneath the bodi tree,” she said.

Just like his other science-fiction books and true to Crichton fashion, Micro pits nature against technology. Based in Honolulu, the Lyon Arboretum is portrayed as the “Waipaka” Arboretum. Staff who took Crichton and his wife on a tour of the arboretum are depicted as characters in the book, including Katajima (as Alyson Bender) and Raymond Baker (as Vin Drake), who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the grounds and was an employee for 38-years before he passed in 2010.

The overview on Crichton’s official website states that Micro is about groundbreaking technology that has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Graduate students from Cambridge, Massachusetts are sent to the arboretum where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier. Once they arrive, they are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn, and find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power.

Crichton’s fascination with the Lyon Arboretum has obviously made a lasting impression. The book was completed by science writer Richard Preston after Crichton passed away to cancer in November 2008.

For more information about the Micro, visit www.michaelcrichton.com/books-micro.html.

As a branch of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the arboretum serves as a center for educational activities on plants, arts, culture, geography and a range of other sciences. Approximately 34,000 visitors each year participate in classes, research projects other community activities or enjoy the beautiful plant and displays on the 200-acre grounds. The Arboretum is responsible for developing a major resource center for tropical plants with Hawaii-, Pacific Basin-, and Asian-focus, by enhancing its living plant collection and establishing an appropriate reference library and herbarium. For more information about the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum, visit www.hawaii.edu/lyonarboetum.

Top photo: The Bromeliad Garden at UH Mānoa’s Harold L. Lyon Arboretum is depicted in Crichton’s posthumously published book, Micro.